19 Feb 2001 wcooley   » (Journeyer)

It feels like I'm never going to get a release out the door. I've been aiming for 0.2.0 for sometime around now, give or take a week or two. I've got enough of a system that I can install it (using the Slackware install floppies and manual procedure) and almost get it booted and working. I've run into a couple of nasty problems. First, I couldn't understand why GRUB wasn't working properly--I was afraid something was wrong with the compile, but it turns out I was mis-understanding how it was supposed to work when /boot was a separate partition. Finally, it booted, but my kernel didn't get past the uncompressing message. Turns out I'd accidentally built for i686, and installing on an i586. Rebuilt the kernel, only to figure out I'd built IDE support as a module. *sigh*

A much nastier and irritating problem is that glibc seems to be building for i686 somehow. I've installed the glibc RPM from Red Hat 6.2 and everything works fine. Using mine, however, certain applications, like 'mount' quit when trying to do certain operations with 'Illegal instruction'. A bit of searching on the web and looking at the Glibc FAQ indicates that it was built with optimization for i686, but I tried again, making sure the host type was correct and giving it the appropriate options, but it still fails. I'm hopeful I will resolve this sometime this week, and will be able to make at least a partially usable release very soon.

In hopes of getting this release out ASAP, I've decided to punt on building a better init system for now, and am just using the Slackware init system.

At least almost everything builds and installs. There are a few packages, like 'at', that don't, but I'm not terribly concerned with them. Of course, there are also a lot of packages that need to be added.

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